Trump lawyer writes to Supreme Court amid E. Jean Carroll appeal
There’s been a mysterious subplot running through President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appeal against writer E. Jean Carroll.
For months now, his petition has been pending in his effort to upend the $5 million in damages awarded to Carroll by a New York jury that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Yet the justices keep rescheduling the petition from consideration at their private conferences where they decide which new cases to take up. The court doesn’t explain why it reschedules petitions.
I speculated in the most recent edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter that perhaps the court, or at least some of the justices, have wanted to put off considering Trump’s petition in order to weigh it alongside another one he has coming, in his separate but related appeal in the case in which Carroll won $83.3 million in defamation damages.
I noted that, on top of involving more money, the second appeal raises issues of presidential immunity and federal government intervention that the high court majority that previously granted Trump broad criminal immunity may be more interested in than the less legally enticing (to the justices) evidentiary issues he raised in the pending petition. (The forthcoming petition involves statements Trump made while he was president during his first term.)
On Tuesday, the same day Trump’s petition was rescheduled yet again, one of his personal lawyers wrote to the justices to suggest that they “may wish to consider the petitions together” once the upcoming one is filed.
That lawyer, Justin Smith, whom Trump has nominated for a federal judgeship, said in the letter that the president plans to bring that new petition to the justices “within the next month.” Smith made a brief case for considering the petitions together by writing that they involve “the same parties” and overlap because they both stem from rejections of Trump by the same New York-based appeals court over dissent from judges he appointed.
Smith’s letter comes after recent reports of a Trump Justice Department probe that could implicate Carroll.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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